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The Venerable Bhante Henepola Gunaratana (b.1927) is a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk based in America. He is a leading figure in the Theravada monasticism and insight meditation movements in the West.

Born in Sri Lanka, Gunaratana was ordained at the age of twelve and trained as a novice for eight years. After full ordination as a monk, he worked as a missionary and educator in India and Malaysia.

Gunaratana first came to the United States in 1968 to serve at the Buddhist Vihara Society in Washington DC and earned master’s and doctorate degrees in philosophy at American University. In 1982, he founded and has since led the Bhavana Society, a meditation practice and monastic life community located in the Shenandoah Valley of West Virginia.

In a state of mindfulness, you see yourself exactly as you are. You see your own selfish behavior. You see your own suffering. And you see how you create that suffering. You see how you hurt others. You pierce right through the layer of lies that you normally tell yourself, and you see what is really there. Mindfulness leads to wisdom.—Henepola Gunaratana

Just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life that simply will not go away.—Henepola Gunaratana

Pulled by our own attachments, we are always chasing phantoms. Terrified, we run away from monsters created from our own aversions. So long as perception is distorted, we are unable to see the true nature of what is in front of us — nothing but an ever-changing collection of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and thoughts or concepts.—Henepola Gunaratana

Be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself. You may not be perfect, but you are all you’ve got to work with. The process of becoming who you will be begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.—Henepola Gunaratana

In meditation, don’t expect anything. Just sit back and see what happens. Treat the whole thing as an experiment. Take an active interest in the test itself, but don’t get distracted by your expectations about the results. For that matter, don’t be anxious for any result whatsoever.—Henepola Gunaratana

Mindfulness is cultivated by a gentle effort. Persistence and a light touch are the secrets. Mindfulness is cultivated by constantly pulling oneself back to a state of awareness, gently, gently, gently.—Henepola Gunaratana

Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom.—Henepola Gunaratana

Accept everything that arises. Accept your feelings, even the ones you wish you did not have. Accept your experiences, even the ones you hate. Don’t condemn yourself for having human flaws and failings. Learn to see all the phenomena in the mind as being perfectly natural and understandable. Try to exercise a disinterested acceptance at all times with respect to everything you experience.—Henepola Gunaratana

You can start by thinking kind thoughts about everyone you have contact with every day. If you have mindfulness, you can do this every waking minute with everyone you deal with. Whenever you see someone, consider that, like yourself, that person wants happiness and wants to avoid suffering. We are all the same. We all feel that way. All beings feel that way. Even the tiniest insect recoils from harm.—Henepola Gunaratana

You can’t ever get everything you want. It is impossible. Luckily, there is another option: You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of the endless cycle of desire and aversion.—Henepola Gunaratana

Compassion is a melting of the heart at the thought of another’s suffering.—Henepola Gunaratana

Buddhism advises you not to implant feelings that you don’t really have or avoid feelings that you do have. If you are miserable you are miserable; that is the reality, that is what is happening, so confront that. Look it square in the eye without flinching. When you are having a bad time, examine that experience, observe it mindfully, study the phenomenon and learn its mechanics. The way out of a trap is to study the trap itself, learn how it is built. You do this by taking the thing apart piece by piece. The trap can’t trap you if it has been taken to pieces. The result is freedom.—Henepola Gunaratana

View all problems as challenges. Look upon negativities that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow. Don’t run from them, condemn yourself, or bury your burden in saintly silence. You have a problem? Great. More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in, and investigate.—Henepola Gunaratana

Mindfulness helps us freeze the frame so that we can become aware of our sensations and experiences as they are, without the distorting coloration of socially conditioned responses or habitual reactions.—Henepola Gunaratana

The brain does not manufacture thoughts unless we stimulate it with habitual verbalizing. When we train ourselves by constant practice to stop verbalizing, the brain can experience things as they are.—Henepola Gunaratana

Somewhere in this process you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way and you just never noticed. You are also no crazier than everybody else around you. The only real difference is that you have confronted the situation they have not.—Henepola Gunaratana

Patience is the key. Patience. If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience. Patience is essential for any profound change.—Henepola Gunaratana

The present moment is changing so fast that we often do not notice its existence at all. Every moment of mind is like a series of pictures passing through a projector. Some of the pictures come from sense impressions. Others come from memories of past experiences or from fantasies of the future.—Henepola Gunaratana